558 HISTCIY OF 



means, they sometimes take twelve or fifteen hundred barrels of 

 pilchards at a draught ; and they place them in heaps on the 

 shore. — It often happens that the quantity caught exceeds the 

 salt or the utensils for curing them ; and they then are carried off 

 to serve for the purposes of manure. This fishery employs not 

 only great numbers of men at sea, training them to naval affairs, 

 but also numbers of women and children at land, in salting and 

 curing the fish ; in making boats, nets, ropes, and casks, for the 

 purposes of taking or fitting them for sale. The poor ^re fed 

 with the superfluity of the capture ; the land is manured with 

 the offals; the merchant finds the gain of commission, and 

 honest commerce ; the fisherman a comfortable subsistence from 

 liis toil. •' Ships," says Dr Borlase, " are often freighted hither 

 with salt, and into foreign countries with the fish, carrying off 

 at the same time a part of our tin. The usual produce of the 

 number of hogsheads exported for ten years, from 1747 to 175(i 

 inclusive, amounted to nearly thirty thousand hogsheads each 

 year; every hogshead has amounted, upon an average, to the 

 price of one pound thirteen shillings and threepence. Thus 

 the money paid for pilchards exported, has annually amounted 

 to near fifty thousand pounds." 



Whence these infinite numbers are derived, still remains ob- 

 scure ; but it will increase our wonder to be told, that so small 

 a fish as the stickleback, which is seldom above two inches long, 

 and that one vpould think could easily find support in any water, 

 is yet obliged to colonize, and leave its native fens in search of 

 new habitations. Once every seventh or eighth year, amazing 

 shoals of these appear in the river Welland, near Spalding, and 

 <ome up the stream, forming one great column. There are sup- 

 j'osed to be multitudes collected in some of the fens, till over- 

 charged with numbers, they are periodically obliged to migrate. 

 An idea may be had of their numbers, when we are informed, 

 that a man, employed by a farmer to take them, for the purpose 

 of manuring his grounds, has got, for a considerable time, four 

 i^liillings a day by selling them at a halfpenny a bushel! 



Thus we see the amazing propagation of fishes along our own 

 coasts and rivers ; but their numbers bear no proportion to the 

 vast quantities found among the islands of the Indian ocean. 

 The inhabitants of these countries are not under the necessity 

 even of providing instruments for fishing j it is but going down 



